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Note added: Since this blog was written, Facebook has modified their API to make much less information available about Facebook friends. While I think adding privacy controls is a good idea, what Facebook has done reduces the richness of the results that Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics can give for Facebook users.
After I wrote about doing personal analytics with data I’ve collected about myself, many people asked how they could do similar things themselves.
Now of course most people haven’t been doing the kind of data collecting that I’ve been doing for the past couple of decades. But these days a lot of people do have a rich source of data about themselves: their Facebook histories.
And today I’m excited to announce that we’ve developed a first round of capabilities in Wolfram|Alpha to let anyone do personal analytics with Facebook data. Wolfram|Alpha knows about all kinds of knowledge domains; now it can know about you, and apply its powers of analysis to give you all sorts of personal analytics. And this is just the beginning; over the months to come, particularly as we see about how people use this, we’ll be adding more and more capabilities.
It’s pretty straightforward to get your personal analytics report: all you have to do is type “facebook report” into the standard Wolfram|Alpha website.
If you’re doing this for the first time, you’ll be prompted to authenticate the Wolfram Connection app in Facebook, and then sign in to Wolfram|Alpha (yes, it’s free). And as soon as you’ve done that, Wolfram|Alpha will immediately get to work generating a personal analytics report from the data it can get about you through Facebook.
Here’s the beginning of the report I get today when I do this:
Yes, it was my birthday yesterday. And yes, as my children are fond of pointing out, I’m getting quite ancient…
I have to admit that I’m not a very diligent user of Facebook (mostly because I have too many other things to do). But I’ve got lots of Facebook friends (most of whom, sadly, I don’t know in real life). And scrolling down in my Wolfram|Alpha personal analytics report, I see this:
Quite a geographic distribution! 85 countries, it says. Nobody from Antarctica, though…
Here’s the age distribution, at least for people who give that data (I do wonder about those 100+ year olds…):
But these kinds of things are just the beginning. When you type “facebook report”, Wolfram|Alpha generates a pretty seriously long report—almost a small book about you, with more than a dozen major chapters, broken into more than 60 sections, with all sorts of drill-downs, alternate views, etc.
Here’s today’s report for me—which would be a lot longer if I were a more diligent Facebook user:
Let’s talk about some of the details. I wish I could do this using my own Facebook data—but I’m just not enough of a Facebook user. So instead I’m going to use data from a few kind souls around our company who’ve agreed to let me share some of their personal analytics.
Close to the top of the report—at least for younger folk—there’s an immediate example of how Wolfram|Alpha’s computational knowledge is used. If it knows from Facebook when and where you were born, it can work out things like what the weather was like (down to the hour in most places—a good memory test for parents!):
In the standard Wolfram|Alpha Facebook personal analytics report, one of the first major sections is about your general Facebook activity. Here are some results for someone who’s definitely a much more serious Facebook user than me:
There’s a peak in activity late last fall, when no doubt something was going on in this person’s life. Wolfram|Alpha shows the weekly distribution of all these updates:
One can see she does lots of photo posting on Sunday nights, at the end of the weekend. Then there’s a clear gap for sleep, and during standard business hours it’s primarily links and status updates…
What apps does she use? Here’s data on that. Why is there all that Baby Gaga on Tuesdays? I’m guessing that’s something automated.
So what’s in someone’s posts? Here’s another part of the standard report, now for a different person:
That’s a nice “most liked post”. Clearly this person (who happens to be the lead developer of the Wolfram|Alpha Facebook personal analytics system that I’m showing here) is pretty upbeat. Look at the word cloud from his posts:
Here’s someone else’s word cloud—notably with her children’s names ordered in size according to age:
You can also look at all sorts of analysis of check-ins, photos, responses to posts, and so on. You can find out which of your posts or photos are most liked, at what times, and by whom:
A big part of the report Wolfram|Alpha generates is actually not about you, but about your friends.
Like here’s the gender distribution for one person’s friends:
And here’s their relationship distribution… showing that, yes, as they get older, this person’s friends mostly tend to get progressively more “hitched”:
It’s fun to see what names are common among your friends:
And you can find out things like who you share the most friends with. (For me—with my rather uncurated friend collection—the results were pretty surprising: 2 of the top 5 were people I’d never heard of… though now of course I’m curious about them…)
Your whole network of friends can actually be shown and analyzed as a network. Here’s my network of friends (restricted to female friends, to reduce the number). I’m the big dot at the center. Each other dot represents a friend, arranged based on mutual friendships.
It’s clearer if I take myself out of the picture, and just show how my friends are connected to each other:
The size of each dot is proportional to the number of friends from my network that that person has. The network is laid out automatically by Wolfram|Alpha, and the colors represent different clusters of friends. It’s interesting to see who my “big connectors” are. If you roll over each dot, you’ll see who it is. The “connector” highlighted here happens to be a long-time former HR director at our company…
Different people seem to end up with very different-looking networks. Here are a few examples:
Sometimes there’s a “biggest connector”—perhaps someone’s spouse. Sometimes there are lots of disjoint clusters (secret lives?). Sometimes—like for my complete friend network, shown in the bottom right—it’s just a big mess, indicating an uncurated collection of friends. And of course you can also use Wolfram|Alpha to do all kinds of fancy graph theory on your friend network—trying to learn for example what “cliques” (in the official graph-theoretic sense) you’re involved with…
OK, so let’s say you’ve found something interesting in your personal analytics report. What can you do with it? We recently introduced a feature called Clip ’n Share. Roll over an image, and a “share” icon comes up. Click it, and you can create a permanent web page that you can link to from Facebook or wherever.
OK, so that’s some of what you can do with your Wolfram|Alpha personal analytics report. But you can actually get a report not just on yourself, but also (so long as they allow it) on your friends. Just enter “facebook friends” in Wolfram|Alpha to get a list of links to your friends, then follow a link to get the personal analytics report for that friend. (Sometimes you’ll see less than in your own report, because your friends don’t allow you as much access to their data.)
It’s quite fascinating—and sometimes revealing—looking at the personal analytics reports for oneself and one’s friends. I think I could spend ages doing it. And coming back at different times to see what’s changed.
The personal analytics system we’re releasing today is just the beginning. We’re looking forward to everyone’s feedback (use the feedback box at the bottom!)—and we’re planning to keep adding more and more features and capabilities. As I said in my original post about personal analytics, I’ve no doubt that one day pretty much everyone will routinely be doing all sorts of personal analytics on a mountain of data that they collect about themselves. But it’s exciting today to be able to start that off with Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook. I hope people have fun with it! And perhaps it will also inspire some young Facebook users to become data scientists…
i’ve been waiting for this, very cool!
what do you do with the data wolfram alpha analyzes? does it get stored anywhere? does wolfram keep any of the data or it’s analysis in anyway? does it use my facebook connect in any other way?
Your information is only stored for one hour, so each time you return, we’ll run fresh analytics on your Facebook data. After one hour the data is deleted.
I hope I am mistaken, but as it currently stand based on your privacy policy and ToS it seems to me that you’re allowed to use all data in any way you would like (as it is technically not input as described in the privacy policy), so it would be quite reasonable to update your privacy policy specifically referencing to this (I personally didn’t dare to use this tool without that).
It would be interesting to get a company on this one from the company.
Stephen, Yes, Mathematica and NKS are great and all; and WolframAlpha has hitherto been terrific, but this may well be your coolest achievement. Can’t wait until your server quiets down and I can try it out.
This is incredible. It’s fascinating to visualize that much data about yourself.
Thank you for building this.
Uhm, cool. If only it worked and didn’t time out on me. Wonder who’s problem it is: FaceBook or WolframAlpjha.. But I say it’s a #fail right at this moment…
We are currently experiencing heavy traffic due to people creating their Wolfram IDs. We are working on making things faster.
Do you have plans to make it so that you can analyze pages? I administrate a couple of pages for an organization that I work for, and it would be interesting to be able to look at the information for those in the same way that I can look at information for my personal profile.
is this not working for anyone else? It flat out isn’t working for me. Very disappointing.
Would be extremely cool if you also released something similar for Twitter.
On one hand, I think this is fantastic and I would love to see something like this for websites like reddit and Google+. On the other hand, it scares me to know just how much can be determined about me just by my facebook profile.
Can you please please please make this app available for page owners!!!!
That would be sooooo awesome.
why not add the capability of gathering information from other social networks? For example I don’t have any of my professional connections on facebook, but I do on LinkedIn. I think the picture of a person that you get from facebook is not complete, if you don’t integrate this app with more serious professional soc. networks. In a way it would be nice and interesting to see who this person really is (facebook) and who he wants people believe he is (linkedin or other)…or viceversa…
I’m curious exactly what “Top sharers” is measuring? It makes sense that my mom is at the top of that list, but a lot of the other people who appear are huge surprises to me.
Are you planning to extend the service to Facebook groups? I’m not active in the main timeline stream, but I do have loads of data in several thematic groups I would very much like to see analysed 🙂
Can you analyze the data of PAGE account associated with personal facebook account? Do I need to purchase the Pro version to access it?
Thx!
This feature is only for personal Facebook accounts. We appreciate the feedback and will pass it on to the developers.
Thank you for all your comments and questions regarding privacy and Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook.
We value the trust that our users put in us, and are committed to maintaining the highest standards of privacy protection.
In order to do analysis on your Facebook data, it is necessary to cache it temporarily on our servers. We acquire the data through the Wolfram Connection app using the Facebook API, respecting whatever privacy settings you have given to Facebook.
Our system is set up to cache your data on our servers for one hour, to allow you to perform queries efficiently. After one hour, our system is set up to delete your data.
We only request your data when you perform a query. While on our servers, your data is stored securely, and is only accessible to you, through queries you make to Wolfram|Alpha.
The results of these queries are private to you, unless you explicitly publish them, for example using our Clip ‘n Share mechanism.
You can review the complete Wolfram|Alpha Privacy Policy here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/privacypolicy.html.
If you have any further concerns, please email us at info@wolframalpha.com.
That is so cool! Where can I get more information about the data visualization technique used to create the friend network graph? I’d love to be able to plot many many different variables and have Wolphram|Alpha suggest different “cluster” patterns that appear!
Great report! I second the suggestion of extending it to FB pages. Thanks
This would be awesome for any networking site like LinkedIn, and even for a Google profile that would include things like Gmail, Reader, Youtube, blah blah blah, very cool thing indeed, I don’t have a facebook so can’t use it but awesome innovation
This is great (I love the deep analytics).
However, I think an analysis of my Twitter account would be much more interesting. When do we get the Twitter Analysis Tool? ; )
This tool makes gathering and data analysis fun. 🙂
Is there a summary report that you can see on selected post/photos you choose to know?
That would be really great!!!
Woah this is nice.. It is actually more detailed than quite many social analytics analyzer. Looking forward for more social stuff from Wolfram 🙂
This facebook report is very helpfull for my social media campains.
Thats really neat stuff!! Are you working on a LinkedIn report along the same lines as well?
Dear all,
Congratulation for the project! It is amazing.
Please, I would like to know if it is possible to analyze my FAN PAGES using this tool?
Do you have any forecast to customize the tool to do it for FAN PAGES?
Thanks a lot,
Regards,
may I add my voice to those asking for similar analytics for Facebook Pages. I would happily upgrade to Pro if that were to be a feature.
Just the sort of tool we’d expect from WolframAlpha, simple to use and brilliant analysis.
I’d be very interested in seeing the tool developed so that charities can use it to analyse their facebook pages, given that many of them have larger than limited companies and have much more interesting interactions. Do keep us informed!
An analysis of the charity sector would help charities enormously, both as a benchmark and guide to newer charities.
The analysis is fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the chart that depicts my friends and how they are clustered. I can imagine this type of analysis on a different social network like LinkedIN and the huge business value that I may derive from it. I can see myself using a tool like this one for business purposes such as prospecting clients…
Really interesting data, never cease to be surprised by you guys.
This would be awesome for any networking site like LinkedIn, and even for a Google profile that would include things like Gmail, Reader, Youtube, blah blah blah, very cool thing indeed, I don’t have a facebook so can’t use it but awesome innovation
I have disjoint networks resulting from my military friends/colleagues, friends from when I was still in High School, and video game buddies. It is interesting to see everyone’s connections like this. I can’t wait to figure out how to punch in the LinkedIn data. Thanks!
This is brilliant – I just love what you guys are doing, pushing back the frontiers of data… Your visualisations are fab.
nik
Great fun with a bit of statistics, but I miss the opportunity of extending history of recent activity, it’s only for the last few months now. I would have liked to see statistics concerning all my activity since creating the account.
[…] you may already know, Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook provides a word cloud of your most frequently used words on Facebook. We want to see your nerdiest […]
Late to discovering the Facebook Report and I love it. I had utilised Facebook’s “Download Your personal Information” service in an attempt to analyse my data but Wolfram|Alpha has exceeded my expectations of analysis. Top job. Mind = blown.
My Facebook Report returned results from September 2013. Is there a method to analysing ALL of my historical data back to 2008? Will purchasing a Pro subscription allow my Facebook data before September 2013 to be included in the Facebook Report?
Thanks in advance.
Where do you select for a fan page or group report? Thank you.
Not sure this works anymore 🙁
http://www.wolframalpha.com/facebook/
I don’t think it’s working right! Facebook must have upgraded beyond the scraping ability of this app since the only year I see referenced to possible release date is a 2014 ©
Doesn’t seem like it should be too hard to update tho! Cmon Wolfram! You can do it…
It looks like this is no longer working. Is there any chance for an updated so that the facebook report/analytics works again? It I had used it a handful of times and it is always fascinating.
Thank you for all the great work!
Best,
Alberto
Thanks for your interest, please see our updated post on personal analytics here.